Are ET's really as smart as we think?

[tha_soda_punk]

I was pondering while staring at the stars tonight, and the thought of our technology and its influence on our every day lives seemed to derail the reason I was staring at the sky in the first place. Its seems pretty ignorant to think (using our logic) that an intelligent species more advanced than us would still rely on their own brain for advanced mechanics of thinking. We barely do that now, especially when it comes to math, and multitasking. Its already become a near necessity for everyone to have a smartphone for us to function in every day life. As Im typing, Im hitting auto correct like a madman!

If we use our current pattern of technological evolution, I think we will eventually create an artificial intelligence that will do everything for us, including making "logical" decisions or what we consider logical at that time. But what if that programmed logical decision making machine is so advanced in its current state of time, that it cant relate to something like an unknown emotion (alien) or has an unrepairable glitch. Especially, when we would be relying on a machine to fix the machine that doesnt understand the problem in the first place?
An example would be like in the movie "Wall-E". They became so reliant on technology, that they became lazy, obese, robotic like, and pretty stupid for space explorers. Could this be why abductees claim their abductors tend to show little emotion and have robotic like behavior, because in fact they are, taking care of the real work while ET anxiously waits for Robot 1000 to spit out the scroll of results? I imagine, Bob the alien cracking his knuckles and saying "Alright Gort, I'm flying this bad boy down to Earth this time, so dont try to stop me! I can do this all by myself." Then Gort plants his hand over his face, shaking his head as he peeks out the window while watching Bob rocket out of the mothership uncontrollably - straight into a ranchers field like a bullet being shot into a pile of mud.[emoji3]

Its just seems like there were so many cultures in the past that used more common sense and logic but unfortunately their teachings will probably be lost in our current, incoherent logical thinking. We stare at the petroglyphs and the handprints on cave walls and mostly underthink the mindset of these people when in fact they might have been so intuned with using their minds, that those handprints could be telling us the real story of our existence in the most simplest of ways our "advanced" logical brains cant comprehend. Would we be able to today, carry a philosophical conversation with a culture 10,000 years ago and understand each others points of views or would we have to convene with the internet for rebuttals in order to keep the conversation going?
Im starting to question if ET's are really as intelligent according to our expectations. If there are other species visiting Earth, they might be more like Larry, Curly, or Moe. In that case, we just might find ourselves very disappointed in the end.
Anyways, I would like to hear someone else's thoughts on this and possibly suggestions of books on this subject.

 

[manxman]

Theres 7 billion humans, how many are educated to a basic standard, 2 billion at most, doesnt take much to be smarter than yer average human innit.

Just being able to reply here makes us smarter than 50 percent of the human race.

 

[Oakenwulf]

I believe you will have your intelligent ones, your dumb ones, your book smart ones, manipulated ones, and ones that dont give a hoot about anything just like us.....

 

[mike]

There is no doubt technology changes us. Weighing up the for the better vs the worse is complex

As scientists have stressed since the dawn of web, the effects of Internet usage on cognition are pretty complicated.

There does seem to be a trend where technology causes atrophy.

Search engines are rerouting our memory. According to Science, we're not necessarily losing our ability to remember things. Rather, the internet is changing how we remember. Ars Technica sums up the results nicely, "People are recalling information less, and instead can remember where to find the information they have forgotten

Google Is Making Us Stupid and Smart at the Same Time? - The Wire

I think as long as you can maintain access to the technology that you come to rely on, then even if its use has caused biological atrophy the end result is still OK.

 

[darka1404]

By the time et gets to planet hoping I think the phone is built in

 

[darka1404]

To the ebe

 

[boomerang]

The question to my mind is whether H sapiens can be as smart as our hypothetically advanced ET. You can't teach a horse calculus. It's not hard to extrapolate that fact with the notion that there may exist certain concepts that are simply not accessible to the best of human brains. I don't think we know the answer to this question.

 

[Burnt State]

Good points, and as Mike has long pointed out intelligence travelling the stars is probably not doing it in a biological incarnation: too risky, perhaps too long, and it might even be too unlikely. The challenges for a civilization to break out of Type 1 status may simply be too large for a species to survive such a journey on their home world. At the rate we're going our modern civilization will probably implode before harnessing the energy of our planet, let along our sun. It might be that escaping those constraints of energy pursuit might be so rare that Type 2 or Type 3 civilizations are probably working on much more fascinating things than worrying about what the bipedal, binary code mammals of earth are up to. If anything they might just have robotic probes sailing about, possibly documenting who is where and what they're up to, just in case they can run into evidence of another type 2 or 3 out there, but checking us out sounds like a rather trite endeavor (which is why we really need to rethink this whole alien visitation/abduction thing). But if it is searching the universe for lowly life forms like us to inspect, bag, tag and analyze then it's probably doing it through AI. As far as the thinking of this planet, I think you are right and the masses are moving away from the contemplative investigation and into gaming, consumerism and pathos. Not really a lot of quality questioning going on:

:

For more stuff of thought and how we have thought through language see: The Stuff of Thought - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[manxman]

Assuming ET is out there.

1] some will be smarter
2] some not as smart

Are ET's really as smart as we think?
As a conundrum

Can i mark a physicists paper, to see if he is really as smart as i think.


Surely i would have to be smarter than him, to assess him.
And in that vein, we could never understand how clever the smarter ones were.

 

[DaveM]

The question posed, are ET's smarter, I assume is meant that they are more technologically advanced. I would much rather explore the idea if these entities are more spiritually advanced or less. That would explain much.

 

[manxman]

I agree, smarter/smart must have many definitions.

 

[Randall]

I was pondering while staring at the stars tonight, and ... Im starting to question if ET's are really as intelligent according to our expectations ... I would like to hear someone else's thoughts on this and possibly suggestions of books on this subject.

I've voiced similar possibilities in other posts so it's nice to see someone else who recognizes the possibility that aliens may not be as brainy as we often imagine. In my past musings on this topic I've pointed out that scientific breakthroughs are sometimes made by accident, so it might just be the case that some aliens may have stumbled upon antigravity, and perhaps they have naturally long lifespans and other traits that don't require all the extra science to achieve long spaceflights or recover from most injuries, and if that's the case, they may not have developed biological science as sophisticated ours.

Maybe they're telepathic and therefore haven't needed to create vast communications networks. Maybe they're smart enough to figure out most of what they need to do without a lot of extra help, so they never developed supercomputers and microchips. I don't know. But that scenario is all certainly possible. It might explain why they are so intent on studying our biology. To them our world might be fascinating, complex and unique, and we're just another curiosity for them to clumsily examine and study. We take our knowledge of our world for granted because we evolved here, but it may be entirely alien to them.

 

[darka1404]

I kind of thought they were a race that was dying and need new genetics to live And they left to much to there tech so now there just falling apart.